Pink slips at conservative site RedState

Erick Erickson, the site’s longtime editor who left in 2015, tweeted about what he called the “mass firing” on Friday morning.

“Very sad to see, but not really surprising given Salem’s direction,” he wrote. “And, finally, after all these years, they’ve turned off my account.”

Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal.

“Insufficiently partisan” was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat.

“They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump,” one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, “how do you define being ‘sufficiently supportive’ of Trump?”

But if it was about politics, it was also about money.

RedState writers work on contract and are paid based on the amount of traffic to their posts.

“Those who had been under a contract with a higher per-click rate were mostly all tossed, only keeping those who were pro-Trump even if their traffic was comparable,” another one of the sources said on condition of anonymity….